Metro Bank offer drive thrus, though they only have a couple.
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You can still use a passbook if you have one already and want to keep using it, but I don’t believe they issue them for new accounts (or at least they didn’t when I opened one).
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Mine was the one before they gave you a Solo card at 16, my first card from Midland Bank was the LiveCash cash card…
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In Santander if you have a passbook account they can’t force you to switch to debit card so they keep issuing the books but only if you had one previously can’t switch back and forth either
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Having a recent clearcut, I came across a passbook for an Abbey National savings account from 1988-89. I’d opened the account in Glasgow when I was still at Uni. The last line on the passbook showed a balance of £670. I got into financial problems after leaving Uni, so thought that the account had probably been cleaned out, but thought I’d better check.
First stage was to go onto the Santander website and request investigation of a dormant account. After a couple of weeks I got a letter confirming that the account still existed and had not been closed, but they could not give me any more information about it. I had to go to a Santander branch with many forms of ID and they would be able to help me.
Santander in Islington was busy and the lady at the counter couldn’t quite understand what I wanted to do (I don’t think she’d ever seen a passbook) and said that I would need to take a seat and wait to talk to one of her colleagues with specialist knowledge.
After about half an hour of waiting I was summoned back to the same person at the counter. Her colleague had returned into the office but was just about to eat his sandwich, but he said he’d try to help the counter assistant while eating his lunch. She really didn’t know what to do and there was lots of to-ing and fro-ing about which fields she should enter and which option she would pick. I was getting a bit embarrassed at this point so I said I would go away and come back another time, given the length of the queue, but he said that now the process was underway it had to be completed.
After they checked my IDs multiple times (“No, I said I was born in 1968, not 1958” - thanks), I was asked for details of my current account so that the funds could be transferred. I handed over my bank card and authorised the transfer.
So, after over an hour spent in the branch, and multiple Santander staff getting involved, that is the story of how I got my 9p back from Abbey National. (I had made loads of ATM withdrawals but never had the passbook updated, which it now was)
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As an illustration of how things have changed since the 1970s…
My grandad died in the late 70s (I’d guess 1978 but could be a year either side). I went into town with mum, and she took his passbook in to the Barnsley Permanent Building Society branch in town.
She handed over the book saying to the cashier that it needed closing, to which the reply was that they’d need Mr Boot to sign for that. Mum replied that she hoped they had a medium in the branch with access to “the other side”, because Mr Boot was dead.
The cashier hummed and hawwed for a while then asked mum what relation she was to Mr Boot, to which she replied daughter. The cashier then said she still needed a signature. Could mum possibly replicate Mr Boot’s signature?
Mum signed where asked, and the account was promptly closed and cash counted and handed over. I don’t know how much there was - it certainly would not have been a huge amount - but there was no request for any ID, or a death certificate. Having the passbook and appearing to be genuine was apparently sufficient!
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My dad (68) had to transfer (not even withdraw) £250k following a house sale, and was rather annoyed by all the security and anti-money laundering checks they had to do, and having to go into a branch to do it as online banking had a limit. He told me how in the past, you could go into a bank and ask to withdraw that kind of money and they’d hand it over in cash and you’d walk out. I had to explain they can’t really do that these days… 
I’m not surprised they didn’t ask for any ID because back in the 70s a lot of people wouldn’t have had any ID anyway. Few working class people drove, they just got the bus, and even fewer went on foreign holidays because they couldn’t afford them, so few people had a driving licence or a passport, at least compared to these days.
I think it was the mid to late 80s before banks and building societies started to ask for ID to open accounts. I remember going into the Bradford & Bingley in about 1980 or 1981 and I just walked in, filled in a form, handed over £1 to open the account and that was that.
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I seem to recall that even in the 1980s a letter addressed to yourself (even handwritten, not a utility bill or similar) was accepted by our local Post Office as ID for certain things.
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They didn’t do that in the past either. Not for 250k.
Might have been possible in one or two places if they knew you personally, but most branches never held that much money.
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Similar, except it was 1968 and Barclays, when they had green cheques on which you paid 2d stamp duty. R-
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Tell us more!
What were green cheques?
And was stamp duty normal on cheques back in the day? Or were you literally paying a processing (stamping) fee to pay them in?
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The colour didn’t have any significance; Barclays cheques just happened to be green.
Yes, you had to pay stamp duty on cheques. I’m not sure when that stopped, but probably in the early 70s. It had gone by the time I got my first cheque book in 1978.
If you search on Google images you will see plenty of old cheques with the stamp duty mark on them.
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Stamp duty (a tax) was payable on cheques between 1853-1971.
The government received quite a bit of revenue from that source.
A tax rate first introduced in 1918…
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I remember having to pay a surcharge on Postal Orders back in the seventies.
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May be of interest to some here.